At the microscopic level, soil from Germany’s Black Forest is a fantastical realm—one that’s mirrored in wooded ecosystems worldwide. Here's how we photographed microscopic creatures hidden in the forest's soil. Video by Oliver Meckes
As plants photosynthesize, converting the sun’s energy into carbon-rich molecules, they exude a portion of these compounds through their roots into the dirt, where microbes and fungi consume them. In exchange, mycorrhizal fungi and certain rootbound microbes help them absorb water and nutrients and convert chemically recalcitrant forms of nitrogen into molecules the plants can use.
Grayston used metal augers to extract plugs of forest soil from the different sites, stored the samples in coolers, and whisked them back to Scotland for closer examination. Laboratory tests and cell cultures revealed that in one part of the woods, intensive harvesting had significantly diminished the abundance of microbes.
Many of their studies compare three types of logging: clear-cutting, which strips all trees from a given site; aggregated retention, which preserves clumps of trees; and dispersed retention, which selectively removes individual trees, retaining a uniform distribution. Most springtails, like the pair seen here, grow no larger than a fifth of an inch. The name comes from the tail-like appendage that allows them to leap more than 20 times their own body length to escape danger.But not all harvesting methods were equally detrimental. The abundance, diversity, and activity of microbes remained relatively high throughout stands that had been uniformly thinned.
“We need to reconsider forestry practices,” says environmental microbiologist Petr Baldrian of the Czech Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Microbiology. “Clear-cutting is economical, but it comes at a huge cost to the state of the soil. We need to find a balance between the needs of industry and the needs of the forest.”
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